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O, what men dare do! What men may do!
What men daily do, not knowing what they do!
We often inconvenience others, when we fancy we can never possibly do so.
My cares and my inquiries are for decency and truth, and in this I am wholly occupied.
Oh, thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already within thee, here and now, couldest thou only see!
God is intelligence occupied with knowing itself.
Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him. “To the persevering mortal,” said Zoroaster, “the blessed Immortals are swift.”
It is necessary to study the mind itself, mind studying mind. We know that there is the power of the mind called reflective. I am talking to you; at the same time I am standing aside, as it were, a second person, and knowing and hearing that I am talking. You work and think at the same time, another portion of your mind stands by and sees that you are talking. The powers of the mind should be concentrated and turned back upon itself, and as the darkest places reveal their secrets before the penetrating rays of the sun, so will this concentrated mind penetrate its own innermost secrets… It will all be revealed to us.
The most positive men are the most credulous, since they most believe themselves, and advise most with their falsest flatterer and worst enemy: their own self-love.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
We can console ourselves for not having great talents as we console ourselves for not having great places. We can be above both in our hearts.
“Is there anything that I can do to make myself enlightened?”
“As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.”
“Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?”
“To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.”
A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket, and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable, and should be retained.
Let us begin life anew.
We ought never to be afraid to repeat an ancient truth when we feel that we can make it more striking by a neater turn, or bring it alongside of another truth, which may make it clearer, and thereby accumulate evidence. It belongs to the inventive faculty to see clearly the relative state of things, and to be able to place them in connection, but the discoveries of past ages belong less to their first authors than to those who make them practically useful to the world.
The endurance of darkness is preparation for great light.
When the mountain disappears as a necessity to climb, the mountain climber disappears as a necessity to exist.
Who would not poverty for riches yield? A hovel sell to buy a treasure-field?
Every further stage of ourselves is within us, above us. Below us lies what we are already, what we have done before. Below us, behind us, is the passive surrender to things, the inertia of the past, the habits of years, and the passive, sensual mind — the mind of the senses — with its sole belief in appearances and passing time. At any point in our lives we are thus between two opposing forces: the force of the realized and the force of the unrealized, what we are and have been, and what we may be. And what we may be is already there, as unhappy feeling, as incompleteness.
Nature never says one thing and wisdom another.
The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.
